Working with text in PowerPoint Efficiently

Text is important in PowerPoint presentations. But you’re not supposed to just type out your content on your slides. You don’t want people just reading your slides and not paying attention to you. When you use text properly, it can magnify your message and make it easy for people to understand what you’re telling them. It can help support the images and other visual media on your slides. That said, don’t underestimate the power of text. Learn how working with text in PowerPoint can make your presentations look awesome.

Navigate within the text in PowerPoint mouse free

To move around the text in your presentation, first of all, use arrow keys.

If you want to jump between words, use Ctrl together with arrow keys.

To move between paragraphs down and up use Ctrl + Down/Up arrow shortcut.

You can go to the end or beginning of the line by clicking End or Home buttons relatively. Please note that on some keyboards, Home and End buttons are located together with arrows. Therefore, you would need to click FN button as well to make it work.

With End or Home buttons you can move to the end or the beginning of the text box quickly.

Highlight text without a mouse

To highlight text in your presentation without a mouse, use Shift + Arrow keys.

If you want to speed up and highlight the whole word in one click, add Ctrl into the mix: Ctrl + Shift + Right/Left Arrow keys.

By using arrows up and down with the same shortcut you can highlight the whole paragraph in micro seconds: Ctrl + Shift + Down/Up Arrow keys.

Finally, to highlight the whole text box at once, just click Ctrl + A.

Shift between cases

To shift between upper, lower, and normal cases, use shortcut Shift + F3.

Bold, Italics, Underline in one click

Ctrl + B will help you to bold or un-bold text quickly.

Ctrl + I is the switch for italics style of text.

Finally, Ctrl + U is the switch to underline your text or take the underline out.

Font Size shortcuts

To decrease the font size of your text in PowerPoint, use Ctrl + [.

Ctrl + ] will play the opposite role for you –  it will increase a font size of your text.

Alignment in micro seconds

There are easy to use shortcuts to align text in PowerPoint super quickly.

Ctrl + R for right alignment

Use Ctrl + E for center alignment

Ctrl + L for left alignment

Another trick is Ctrl + J for centrally justified alignment

Font Window

There is an easy shortcut to use to play with your text even more. Ctrl + Shift + F will open the Font Window for you.

In the Font Window, you can choose different fonts, font styles, font sizes, character spacing, and so on. We highly recommend using this tool to customize text perfectly for your needs. Thus, working with text in PowerPoint could not be easier.

Find Window

When you want to find a specific word/text within your text box, click Ctrl + F to open a Find window in PowerPoint.

In the Find Window, you also have an option to replace one word to another automatically within the whole text. Let’s say in a given below example, we want to replace the word “presentation” with “pitch deck”.

To click a button “Replace” without using a mouse you would need to click Alt together with the underlined letter on the button. In our case scenario, it would be Alt + R.

In the field “Replace with” put the word you’d like to use instead of the word “presentation” (we want to use “pitch deck”).

Again push the button “Replace All” mouse-free. Alt and underlined letter on the button pushed together would get you there – Alt + A in our example.

PowerPoint will give you a notification of how many replacements have been made.

Conclusion

Keyboard shortcuts are the easiest way to do things faster. However, with a wide variety of software, it’s hard to remember all the different shortcuts. Even though we all know they are useful, few of us bother using them. keySkillset is happy to provide the best solution on the market to build muscle memory when working with text in PowerPoint.

‍